About two thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ, a Mesopotamian herdman left his fertile plains, and the protection of city walls, becoming a nomad and setting out into the unknown.
That is the external view of the happening which was to be a beginning in an increasing purpose which has run through the ages and which reaches forward to the future. To all outward seeming it was an ordinary event, insignificant enough amongst the tribal migrations of a period when much of humanity was on the march. Its importance lay within its significance to the consciousness of the one who left the stability and comfort of Ur for the perils of the desert steppes, to whom it was the response to a call. “The Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee.”
It sometimes comes to our realisation, quite suddenly, that the things we read about in the Bible really happened. It is not that we ever doubled. On the contrary, we would have asserted our belief vehemently. But our belief in these things has been involved with other things and other emotions. In early childhood we learned “Bible Stories” which we gradually learned to place in a separate class from the other heroic tales of the nursery. Then they became involved with faith, with theology. So much are they the background of belief that it is with a start that we sometimes realise that they were once not background but foreground, real incidents in the lives of ordinary people.
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Author: A. H. Boulton
Keywords: Abraham, stranger and pilgrim, Abram, Abraham was a stranger and pilgrim, city of God, city whose builder is God, Ur of Chaldees, Promise to Abraham, Promise to Abram
Bible reference(s): Genesis 12:1-4, Heb 11:8, Hebrews 11:10, Hebrews 11:16
Source: “Not Knowing Whither He Went,” The Testimony, Vol. 8, No. 87, March 1938, pp. 84-6.
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